The Pop Life

By Stephen Holden

Published: January 23, 1991

Shirley Horn's Backup

In the title song of Shirley Horn's extraordinary new album, "You Won't Forget Me" (Verve/Polygram) the 56-year-old jazz singer and pianist from Washington is joined by the trumpet of Miles Davis augmenting the regular members of her trio, Charles Ables on bass and Steve Williams on drums.

It has been more than 20 years since Mr. Davis accompanied any singer on an album as a side musician, and his solos on the ballad, which Ms. Horn interprets with a quiet but impassioned gravity, are played in the classic, cool style that the legendary trumpeter all but abandoned after the 1960's.

Mr. Davis's contribution to the album fulfills a promise he made 25 years ago, when he first heard Ms. Horn sing the same song at the Village Vanguard, the Greenwich Village club where she returned last night for a five-night engagement.

"I was supposed to be doing a live album at the Vanguard," she recalled in a telephone interview from Washington last week, "but because my grandmother passed away I wasn't able to handle it, and so I didn't finish the recording. Miles heard me sing the ballad and said he liked my use of space and told me he wanted to record it one day."

Her new album also includes a deep, ruminative rendition of "It Had to Be You," featuring Branford Marsalis on tenor saxophone; an upbeat "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," on which Wynton Marsalis solos on trumpet, and two numbers ("Beautiful Love" and "Soothe Me") in which she is joined by Toots Thielemans on harmonica.

"You Won't Forget Me," her third album for Verve/Polygram and the 14th of a recording career that began in 1961, should finally bring Ms. Horn acclaim as a jazz vocalist worthy of comparison with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae. In its phrasing and psychological depth, her spare, unornamented singing recalls Holiday in the late 1950's, although Ms. Horn's smoky voice is in much better condition. Instead of the extreme despair expressed by Holiday's last recordings, Ms. Horn projects the contemplative resilience of someone who is wounded but wise.

The major reason that acclaim has been so late in coming to Ms. Horn is that she chose not to push her career at a crucial moment. Two years after she recorded her first album, she had a daughter, Rainy, now 27. To be a full-time mother, Ms. Horn restricted her club performances to the Washington-Baltimore area for many years.

"I have no regrets," she said.

A piano prodigy at the age of 4 who studied composition at Howard University from the age of 12, Ms. Horn said she started out in jazz copying Erroll Garner's recording of "Penthouse Serenade."

"It made me a big star in school," she said. "Then I heard Ahmad Jamal and fell in love with him. Ahmad Jamal is my Debussy and Oscar Peterson my Rachmaninoff.

"I began singing while I was in school working in a dinner restaurant. This gentleman would come in every evening and have dinner. One night three or four weeks before Christmas, he walked in with a teddy bear that was as tall as I was and said, 'If you sing "Melancholy Baby," the teddy bear is yours.' It was the first time I sang professionally." Merging 2 Worlds

"Dance music has become very easy for non-musicians to create," David Cole said last week. "What Robert and I like to do is to keep a live feel. Synthesized music is great, but it can become stale. It's time to start merging the synthesized world with the live world."

Under the name C&C Music Factory, the New York-based team of Mr. Cole, who is 28 years old, and his producing and songwriting partner, Robert Clivilles, 26, have become one of the most sought-after production teams for contemporary dance music. This week, their hit, "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" rises to No. 3 on Billboard's pop singles chart. The record, which has already sold more than a million copies, is an exuberantly slamming mixture of rap, synthesizer pop and funk performed by Freedom Williams, a New York rapper, along with the singers Zelma Davis, Deborah Cooper and Martha Wash.

Mr. Cole and Mr. Clivilles met five years ago at Better Days, a dance club then on West 49th Street in Manhattan, where Mr. Cole sometimes augmented the recorded dance music with his own live keyboards. With Mr. Clivilles, a club disk jockey who does the drum programming on the C&C Music Factory's records, Mr. Cole became a regular disk jockey and keyboardist at the club. Together they went on to remix and produce a succession of underground club hits. Their big break came three years ago when their house music remix of Natalie Cole's "Pink Cadillac" became a dance-club sensation.

They went on to put together the female trio Seduction, whose debut album, "Nothing Matters Without Love," they wrote and produced. It sold more than 500,000 copies and yielded a top-five single, "Two to Make It Right." This summer they will begin recording Seduction's second album. Meanwhile, many other artists are competing for their services.

The team's ultimate goal, Mr. Cole said, is "to create the Madonnas and the Michael Jacksons -- the stars who will last in the future." A Desert Shield Hit

"Show Me the Way," the current hit single by the rock group Styx, is a ballad of hope and yearning that several disk jockeys have been treating as a wartime anthem. Prefacing the song with remarks and interpolating sound bites into the record, at least three disk jockeys around the country have created what have been called Desert Shield versions of the song. They generated so many requests that other stations are either playing one of the completed mixes or are preparing their own versions.

One Desert Shield version of "Show Me the Way," prepared by Ray Edwards, a disk jockey at WOKI-FM in Knoxville, Tenn., is currently that station's most requested record. At WAVA-FM in Washington, a version that uses excerpts from Congressional debates and snippets of telephone calls from listeners has also generated strong response. Major radio stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Miami and Detroit are playing the WAVA version.

Meanwhile, the undoctored version of the single on A&M Records moves this week to No. 40 on Billboard's pop singles chart.